So I have a Seagate 2TB bare drive in an external enclosure as my Time Machine backup drive. It has been acting up and giving SMART errors. I decided I should RMA or replace it before it dies altogether, but I'm concerned about the data still on it. My choices are:
- Use Disk Utility to securely erase the drive
- Boot with DBAN and do basically the same thing
- Buy a new drive and physically destroy the old one
- ...
I'm leaning towards 3, because some of the client data I have have on the drive is quite sensitive. I'm not paranoid about it, but I'd like to be able to say no corners were cut to ensure the data is secure.
But I've been reading up on secure erasing and came across this utility CMRR Secure Erase which looks pretty good. The utility I can't get working on the computers I have available to me right now. It's also unsupported.
I tried to manually fire up the Secure Erase function by connecting the drive to a linux computer and used the command
sudo hdparm --security-erase-enhanced bob /dev/sdb
But while the command was issued, it didn't seem to take. I waited a while then reconnected it back to the Mac and the files were still there.
So I was wondering if there was any way to access a drive's Secure Erase function on a Mac or Linux computer?
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